Tuesday, July 31, 2018

How I went to bed and woke up 5 days later with a partial beard and my crotch shaved.

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“I went home with a waitress,

The way I always do

How was I to know

She was with the Russians too.”

W. Zevon

There are places in
my head that are greyed out now – like real city places where things have
happened, and talks have talked – all things that should be memories but are
not. When I try to pin these things down with words, they escape and bounce
away as if greased pigs fleeing the horror of a wayward children’s zoo. They
are things just outside of sight, outside of the patterns of my mind --they are
places that I’ve been or are going to, or maybe omens and portents – it’s hard
to say, but like the auras that precede a seizure, this where the road to
nowhere begins for me.

These are the dreams
I fall into shortly before I lose it. The fact that they are too vaporous to
describe with words concerns me, but it seems important to try because flashes
of them happen to me many times a day now. At work, they come when sitting at
my desk looking at a monitor, in cars when I stop between stops. They come
unbidden as if waiting for the right time – like a software update looking
to load during a slack time. The problem is that I can’t remember where the
individual pieces go, or even identify the parts of them at all. This stuff
seems to be off-memory and not available for access, by me anyway.

Maybe it’s better
just to describe things in a beginning to end narrative. For a novel, this
would be easy and fun – I can be the unreliable historian telling the tale, and by including official hospital documents, you could actually track the progress
of my delusions. The problem comes from this being more of a documentary with
limited paperwork. It’s the stuff of madness, so why not tell it as I maybe see it
in the order I mis-remember it:

I went to work on a Thursday
and felt funky most of the day – no locked in a vault kind of stuff, but
feverish and missing noticeable pieces along my timeline of reality – as I said,
kind of funky.

I got home about
three in the afternoon, a couple of hours before Mary, as usual. I remember
feeling hot, so wet a dish towel and wrapped it around my head like a modified
white guy doo rag, but less stylish. When Mary got home, I remember making
excuses and going to bed. I woke up in the hospital sometime on Saturday, kind
of confused. I had an IV in my left hand, a heart monitor with other dangly
things connected to my chest, and my crotch was shaved, both sides.

I was found mentally out of
it, in bed and non-responsive, by Mary. She called her sister, the doctor--and
911. An ambulance took me to Good Samaritan Hospital. Because I have a permanent
pacemaker, they thought this might have failed me, or that perhaps I had bad
heart beats that might need an implantable defibrillator. One of the many tests
was in the cardiac catheterization lab – that’s why I was shaved. I also stank like
a hobo and had the meaty beginnings of a half-assed beard.

By Sunday I was
getting better – I have poor memories of the day, but do remember parts of it –
visits, partial conversations with doctors, and a lot of people stared at me in
a funny kind of way, but I’m kind of used to that. On Monday, I was good enough
to send home. (I’m good at faking sort of normal, so getting them to let me go
wasn’t that hard.) Also – they were not sure who would pay them for their
services, that helped.

So, in the week I’ve
been out, I feel sharp – my sense of humor has come back, and my ability to
write in complete sentences seems unimpaired. Physically, I’m better than ever,
walking more and continuing to lose weight. They discharged me without a diagnosis
– other than vaguely blood pressure related stuff. I’ve followed up with my
regular doctor, whom I love, and the VA seems willing to pay for my hospitalization.

Everything has played
out better than I have any right to expect. But the auras continue.

Update a week later -- the auras have gone, and I feel pretty normal, or normally abnormal if you prefer.

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About Me

"Supreme egotism and utter seriousness are necessary for the greatest accomplishment,
and these the Irish find hard to sustain; at some point, the instinct to see life in a
comic light becomes irrestible, and ambition falls before it."
William Shannon